from the not-the-change-we-were-looking-for dept

The folks from the Sunlight Foundation have noticed that the Change.gov website, which was set up by the Obama transition team after the election in 2008 has suddenly been scrubbed of all of its original content. They noted that the front page had pointed to the White House website for a while, but you could still access a variety of old material and agendas. They were wondering why the administration would suddenly pull all that interesting archival information... and hit upon a clue. A little bit from the "ethics agenda":

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

Yeah. That statement seems a bit embarrassing at the very same time Obama's administration is threatening trade sanctions against anyone who grants asylum to Ed Snowden. Also... at the same time that we get to see how whistleblower Bradley Manning's "full access to courts and due process" will turn out. So far, it's been anything but reasonable, considering that the UN has already condemned Manning's treatment as "cruel and inhuman." And people wonder why Snowden left the country...

from the help-me,-I'm-missing-something... dept

There's been plenty of attention paid to the news that the website for President-Elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov has been placed under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to make use of the content with attribution. However, I'm a bit hard pressed to see how this actually is a big deal. The whole thing is made a bit odd by the fact that federal government content is not covered by copyright, so anything that comes out of the White House is in the public domain. But, apparently since Obama has not yet been inaugurated, the campaign can still claim copyright on the content. But, why would they? Rather than going with a CC license, why not go all the way and put the content in the public domain? After all, in two months, all such content will be in the public domain anyway? It seems a little odd, counterproductive and unnecessary to add more restrictions to the content than there will be once Obama is actually in office. If the Obama team really wanted to do something meaningful concerning the content on the site, they could follow the advice of Tim O'Reilly and go beyond just putting the content in the public domain and also add revision control, thereby committing to alerting people to any changes to the content. Now, that would be an impressive change.